MarketShare has witnessed firsthand how major marketing organizations are becoming more data driven, and more focused on marketing analytics, digital attribution and big data in general. This in turn means that more and more of these companies are specifically seeking to hire marketers with data and analytics skills and experience.

But we were curious: Just how widespread is this trend? Are companies that talk about embracing analytics backing it up with their hiring practices? And how are those hiring practices evolving? All indications point to a tectonic shift. But – being data-driven ourselves – we didn’t want to settle for anecdotal evidence of this highly significant trend. We wanted some, well, data.

So we asked the folks at Austin, TX-based icrunchdata to help us look into it. This company recently launched a unique Big Data Jobs Index that crunches data on hundreds of thousands of positions in analytics, big data, business intelligence, data science, statistics and software development. Our goal was to uncover the extent to which marketing-related job requirements have changed over the last three years to now include data analytics capabilities and related specialized knowledge.

Marketing Analytics Job Analysis Findings

The icrunchdata Big Data Jobs Index is meant to provide a benchmark estimate for visualizing the present state – and future job trends – in various categories of big data. The CEO + Founder of icrunchdata, calls big data “one of the most hyper-growth niches of employment in a century.” Some sources predict that big data alone will create 1.9 million new jobs by 2015 in the U.S. alone.

As of our analysis date (July 2013), there were 23,118 job postings that included one or more of the requirements: marketing analytics, advanced analytics, marketing mix modeling, media mix modeling or digital attribution.

The growth rate in marketing-related analytics hires is what’s eye-popping – up 67% over the past year, and 136% over the past three years. Over the past year, the number of jobs with “big data” as a requirement increased 63%, so the marketing side even beats that.

And icrunchdata has an interesting theory. Since “big data” is such an over-used and overly-general term, organizations are starting to fine tune their recruiting strategies to search for more specific skill sets underneath the big data umbrella. A few examples would be data visualization, data security and data science. Likewise, marketing organizations are also better defining specific needs within “analytics” and getting more precise at searching for specific analytics-related skill sets, as opposed to hiring someone with a general analytics background.

For CMOs, this is further evidence of the accelerating shift toward more – and more sophisticated – use of analytics in marketing. And here again, organizations leading these advances will win.